I miss Thee Comic Column here on Joup. I really do. And while I haven’t had a chance yet to bother our own Shawn Baker regarding his recent absenteeism from his critical and cultural evaluations of comic books and graphic novels on these digital pages, I’m hoping that my own foray into cheerleading a new illustrated property will perhaps ignite the fires again for him. All gentle urging aside, I probably would have written this essay even if Shawn’s column were still going strong.

Eyes blurred and head foggy, this year went by in a flurry. There was just so much to take in…everywhere…everyday, scores of great albums, great movies, great TV shows, great books, great comics, great beer, and more, more, more! So this year, rather than do a run through of my favorite records, songs, etc., I picked ten different things from pop culture that made my 2015 awesome. Though, if you are interested, you can and should check out my year-end album list, song list, and movie list. There’s some good stuff in there, I swear.

More and more frequently I find myself wondering whether the world has always been this despicable or if I’m just becoming more conscious of it. Concurrent with this feeling is a realisation that our generation is being increasingly more spoilt with a Pop Culture smorgasbord: the Heroes of our youth dominate the Box Office, favourite bands of the past reform and tour, the best TV show of all time revived after a 25 year hiatus, Comic-Con has gone supernova. One of the few gifts of being a dentally challenged, pallid skinned Brit is an ever healthy cynicism possibly attributable to being of an island nation still living on a pension from a highly questionable Imperial legacy, which during the best of times enables many of us to take a dim view of anything that on the surface seems too good to be true. Back in my teens when I thought ‘The X Files’ was giving me a window into the clandestine machinations of the world’s superpowers my dad calmly and succinctly cut through my teenage distrust of his adulthood by putting it to me ‘hypothetically’ that THEY would love it if we were ‘watching the skies’ rather than paying attention to what was going on in front of our noses.

If you read this column regularly you will no doubt have heard my mantra, born of both practicality and frustration: You can’t read everything.

You’ll also know I commonly follow that up with, “But you can try!”

That said, whenever we book a guest for Drinking with Comicswhose work I am unfamiliar with I dig in and familiarize myself. This was especially true when my co-host Mike Wellman booked writer D.J. Kirkbride for this coming Monday, March 23rd. I’d read or heard about Mr. Kirkbride’s work for some time, yet up until last week had remained largely unfamiliar with it. Mike helped me out of that one.

Well, there I was all ready to dive into decoding a new issue of Nameless and, well, Mr. Morrison pretty much did most of the work for me.

Crap.

The enigmatic approach left behind, issue two begins with Nameless and his escorts as they arrive at Paul Darious’s Billionauts base on the dark side of the moon. Once situated we quickly get A LOT more of the Enochian language message we are introduced to in issue #1. We meet Dr. Croft, the base’s former expert on occult matters and see that something has either possessed her or sent her over the edge of sanity. The others on the base have quarantined Dr. Croft and when Burnham flashes to her we see that written on the walls of her cell in what is probably *gag* either shite or blood or a happy mixture of both, what appears to be a continuation of that Enochian message:

A few months ago on Drinking with Comics my co-host Mike Wellman became absolutely aghast when he learned I had never read Eric Powell’s The Goon. Admittedly, since starting the show there have been quite a few books that I haven’t read that Mike has trouble understanding: Hellboy, Elephantmen (remedied now) and The Goon were big sticking points right off the bat. My defense is what it always is – you can’t read everything. There’s plenty of stuff we overlap on and probably an equal amount he’s not read that I feel is essential. It takes work to keep up, and in the interest of trying to read everything good sometimes you need a friend to point you in a particular direction you may have missed. So it was in that spirit after the shoot that night that I took Mike’s advice on where to begin The Goon and picked up the second volume of the trades.

First: there will be some who will roll their eyes at the title I chose for this piece. That’s fine. However, the fact remains that nothing is “important” until we choose to assign that value to it. Under different circumstances I might have rolled my eyes at an article bearing this title. As you read this piece you’ll see that initially I wasn’t the most receptive person for a title with a decades-deceased character re-packaged with familiar super powers. However, several things happened that changed my mind and in the process made Spider Gwen suddenly feel very important in the context of the comic book industry and Geek culture overall. It is this importance I’d like to discuss now, so whether you’re one of the folks who LOVE this new character or a skeptic, follow me down the rabbit hole and let me make my case for why I feel Spider Gwen is a watershed for much-needed change in the comic book industry.